Judgments of WRONGNESS and GOODNESS are one of the richest topics of passionate communication.
Feel free to make this topic into your major subject matter, with 6-8 week hours in classwork and a possible “master of judgments” certificate from our school.
Judgments communicate with a punch: “This is wrong/right.” – “You are wrong.” – “They are wrong.” etc. But the way in which the blow is dealt, comes in a variety of strength and colors. Most of us master this type of making request very well, yet there is some possibility to raise our awareness and conscious choice of this method of communicating. This lack of awareness and choice can have a variety of reasons, which in themselves form a separate area of investigation – self-deception >> for good reasons! 🙂
To be a nice person, a civilized person, a person well balanced to manage your anger etc. – we have many ideas about how we are or how we should be that can throw some fog over the awareness of our use of judgments to communicate about what we want.
Syntax matters
Judgments of WRONGNESS can be couched in various syntactical forms
- Questions
- Statements
- Adjectives
- Metaphors
- Comparisons
- Negations
You can chose a specialisation in any of these subclasses.
In general, in violent communication, we can express that someone is bad in various perspectives. Morally bad, from an ethical standpoint, or from a personal standpoint, having some physical or psychological characteristics that could be better.
All judgments are tragic expressions of unmet needs.
Marshall Rosenberg came up with this evaluation. Judments are often motivated by unmet needs and lead to an outcome, that does not fulfil the unmet need – and in addition leads to more unmet needs in other people – tragic.
Formulating our needs in terms of what is wrong with someone else usually lowers the willingness of the other person to do what you would like them to do.
Hearing jugdments is possible, but not obliged
Furthermore we have the two research areas of “receiving judgments” and “sending judgments”. Blaming can be investigated from the receiving and the sending side. Who controls if something is a blame or not?
Actually both the sender and the receiver are responsible for the evaluation “blame”.
Form and Content
Somebody can say words that sound like blame and mean a loving request.
This is possible mostly when trust and quality of the relationship are high.
Somebody can hear a loving request when the words have the form of a blame.
This is the true liberation we can access through the work of self-compassion.
Please and Thank you
In a true sense we only say please and thank you – but this perspective is a pure giraffe perspective. When we look at our habitual way of perceiving the world, it is full of demands, threats and manipulation through praise. Humankind has been bad, is bad and will stay bad forevermore.
So we may appreciate the difference between what is habitual and what is possible, perhaps as an invitation to make a choice and simply give up. There are so many jackals, so many requirements in life, I will never be able to change into the giraffe perspective. So you may stay there. Choose it and accept that you prefer the ease of normal, everyday communication. Accept that you think in terms of jackal labels and comparisons, do not judgde yourself on top of that or try to hide it. Question of honesty.
The key to do anything is to ask oneself, is it joyful?
Take care.